General
Strickland Jumps In With Kerry
Wow! Bizzyblog has a good paraphrase of what Strickland said yesterday:
But if you look at the people who are serving in our military today, you will find a disproportionate share come from small town America, rural areas, and they are disproportionately being called upon to defend this country. You know as well as I do that there may be one or two members of the 535 members of the House and Senate that have a son or daughter in Iraq. Most of them do not, and that’s true of a lot of young people who come from more privileged backgrounds.
….. I strongly believe that if this war was being fully shared by all segments of our society, by all income levels and so on, that a lot of people may have a different attitude about what’s happening and the lives that are being lost, and the young people that are being maimed for life.
So Strickland is caught ON TAPE repeating Michael Moore talking points. Great, just great. Here are the facts:
We then see that of 535 Congressional families, there are two with a child who served in Iraq. How does this compare with American families in general? In the summer of 2003, U.S. troop levels in Iraq were raised to 145,000. If we factor in troop rotation, we could estimate that about 300,000 people have served in Iraq at some point. According to the Census Bureau, there were 104,705,000 households in the United States in 2000. (See Table 1 of the Census Report.) So the ratio of ordinary U.S. households to Iraqi service personnel is 104,705,000 to 300,000. This reduces to a ratio of 349:1.
In contrast the ratio of Congressional households to Iraqi service personnel is 535:2. This reduces to a ratio of 268:1.
Stated another way, a Congressional household is about 23 percent more likely than an ordinary household to be closely related to an Iraqi serviceman or servicewoman.
Of course my statistical methodology is very simple. A more sophisticated analysis would look only at Congressional and U.S. households from which at least one child is legally eligible to enlist in the military. Moore, obviously, never attempted such a comparison; instead, he deceived viewers into believing that Congressional families were extremely different from other families in enlistment rates.
So the question remains, exactly how would Strickland get his ideal proportional representation in the military. Quota’s? Drafting rich kids? I’m curious.
Discussion
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[...] NixGuy has shown that the claim of disproportionality and legislative privilege is not only false, even if the correct number is as low as two, but that it echoes a certain rotund moviemaker’s debunked claim (scroll down to Congressional Children in War Deceits 53-56 (SEVEN congresspersons had children in active military duty in 2003, and at least two of them were in Iraq at the time of the debunking). [...]
[...] This follows John Kerry’s “botched joke” (horse manure — we know what he meant, and he hasn’t really apologized for anything) and Ohio Governor-elect Ted Strickland’s long, painful dissertation on the economic reasons why soldiers enlist and why sons and daughters of official Washington don’t (which has the unfortunate characteristic, like so much of what Ted says, of not being true — also noted as such by fellow blogger NixGuy here). [...]